Grove City College Professor of Political Science Dr. Paul Kengor is highlighting some of history’s worst actors in a new PragerU video series “Hall of Evil.”
The first video, released this week, focuses on Communist leader Vladimir Lenin. Kengor, a noted Cold War historian, breaks down the Marxist revolutionary’s background, his role in the Russian revolution and establishment of the Soviet Union, and the horrors he unleashed leading the totalitarian state.
Kengor makes it clear that there is nothing romantic about Lenin’s revolutionary fervor and that any suggestion that his utopian vision was perverted by his Soviet successors is misguided. “There was no ‘good’ Lenin. He was a monster,” Kengor concludes.
The video is the first of series of six in which Kengor covers some of the 20th century’s worst dictators and tyrants, including Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro.
PragerU is a nonprofit that creates educational content promoting conservative American viewpoints on economic, political, and social topics. Its videos are popular with homeschoolers and have recently been approved for use in public schools in some states.
Kengor did a video for PragerU on Karl Marx in 2018 that has racked up more than eight million views. “I was blown away by the response,” he said. Last year they approached him about producing a “worst dictators” series. “They eventually changed the name to the ‘Hall of Evil,’ which I think is brilliant,” Kengor said.
The Los Angeles-based PragerU team flew to Pittsburgh in June and spent four days with Kengor writing and reviewing scripts and recording the videos in a television studio. Kengor said one reason he is excited about the series is its potential to attract prospective students to Grove City College.
“PragerU’s chief audience is young people, especially in high school,” he said. “I have a current student, a Poli Sci major, who told me that he learned of Grove City College from that Karl Marx video. I hope we can get a thousand more like him.”
Kengor isn’t the only faculty member to contribute to PragerU’s library. Professor of History Dr. Jason Edwards has done two videos for PragerU on presidents William McKinley and Rutherford B. Hayes.
PragerU co-founder Allen Estrin hailed the collaboration with Grove City College. “At PragerU, we like to say that we teach what should be taught. One of the rare places where that also happens is Grove City College,” Estrin said. “I hope PragerU and GCC can collaborate on more projects in the near future—it’s certainly our intention.”
Kengor was the perfect choice for the “Hall of Evil” series he said. “Who better than Paul to explain the death and destruction that communism wrought in the 20th century? Sadly, the evils of communism and socialism are not well known to young people today. Our hope is that by watching this series, they’ll recognize that this is not a path we want to go down,” Estrin said.